Difficulty letting go.

You know, I thought the hard part of closing the door on my neglected other serial projects would be saying so, coming to the decision and then getting the words out... I figured once I'd done that, it would be easy to wrap up the loose ends.

But I'm still not grappling with it. The actual act of putting up explanations on the individual sites feels daunting. I'm not sure what I want to say and how to say it.

But the whole point of this is to put them out of my mind, get them behind me, and forge on for the future... so for now that's what I'm doing. I'll shelve the shelving of them for a week or so and devote myself to other things. I've written a bit of a thing that could become the first new Fantasy In Miniature piece in a while. I've got a Tales of MU chapter pending, that I'm going to apply myself to with relish as soon as I put this post through. I have a roleplaying game project that's excited some interest... and that's not counting all the people who've said over the years that they'd love to play a game by me.

So, anyway.... shoving off or shoving on, it's time to shove forward. Okay that sign-off didn't make a lot of sense, but imagine I compressed several more paragraphs of rambling into one sentence.

A Wilder World: Evolving Archetypes

The Archetype I'm currently calling Brute has gone through an interesting progression. The basic idea was "Barbarian", but stripped of a lot of baggage. "Berserker" and "Rage Warrior" were interim names that I didn't want to stick with because I didn't plan on having any mechanics to represent mindless aggression that can spiral out of the player's control. I settled on Brute, to evoke a brute force approach to fighting, with the positive result of realizing how the same Archetype I'd envisioned for people charging around with battleaxes could also work for wizards heedlessly tossing fireballs and such.

Similarly, when I started out with an Archetype called "Tank" I knew that was a placeholder name, both because it sounded too modern and because it brought to mind concepts that I thought would better be handled as separate Archetypes... I was using it for the "damage soaking" portion of the MMO-style Tank role.

My second stab at naming that Archetype was Juggernaut, which I still wasn't in love with. It's evocative, yes, but it evokes the unstoppable force much more than the immovable object. The damage-soaking Archetype plus the Brute Archetype might yield a Juggernaut, in the same way that the Archetype plus Challenger and/or Defender might yield something more like a Tank.

I came up with what I think will be its final name when I was considering how many Archetype names seemed to be evocative of negative character traits (Coward. Fool. Brute.)... I thought, "Well, why not have an Archetype exemplified by bravery?"

And when I started to brainstorm names for that, it didn't take long before I hit on a winner: Stalwart.

But I have enough Archetype ideas that a placeholder name isn't worth holding a place for, so I immediately started brainstorming ideas for what the Stalwart would be able to do, what it would look like.

And I realized right away: it would look an awful lot like the Juggernaut. Standing unmoving in the face of danger, keeping calm and steady as wave after wave of enemy thunders across the battlefield, shrugging off blows that would fell lesser beings... that was the Juggernaut. That's the Stalwart.

I didn't just paste the Stalwart label over the Juggernaut Archetype, of course. Calling the Archetype "Stalwart" helped me refine what it is actually about. It gave me an Archetype that uses the concept of Resolve to better effect than anything else has so far, which solved some balance problems I was having with the Juggernaut basically being an HP-recovery factory.

The vaguely defined abilities of the Juggernaut gave way to solid ideas for the Stalwart, along with a bunch of Techniques that are ultimately more interesting than variations on "gets hit, doesn't fall over". Now I have an Archetype that works not just for the big beefy barbarian who's too stupid to die, but the rebel who's too stubborn, the knight, the zealot, the plucky kid...

Yes, Stalwart is way better than Juggernaut.

(I could make a whole other post about the possibilities you get when you combine Coward and Stalwart. I call it "Stubborn Survivor". Give that character any offensive capabilities at all and you are officially the headache that won't go away.)

I hope to post more concrete info and less rambly rambles in the near future, because I know the concrete info gives a much better sense of the shape of things. I've just got to bear down and regain some focus. For now, it's time for sleep... or to be more precise, it was time for sleep half an hour ago, but then I started thinking about the Archetypes.